Founders who are probably thinking about fundraising for the first time.
If you’re a repeat, VC-backed founder, or you’re in YC, the rules are different and you should probably ignore this. Equally, if you’re coming from a top AI research lab like OpenAI or Anthropic, you can generally walk into any VC and walk out with $$$.
For everyone else, I hope this is helpful…
In the interest of clarity and conciseness I’m going to write in absolute terms and rules, as if this is the ‘only’ way to fundraise.
Clearly, there is no one right path, and every rule is made to be broken. I’m not going to preface all the advice with ‘this is what worked’ or ‘you could do this’, as it just takes more time. I’ll just say ‘do this’ or ‘do that’.
You’re welcome to take, or ignore, any steps or advice. This is just what I think works the best.
What do I need to have achieved to be able to fundraise? Should I have traction? How much? This is more of an art than a science, but there are three main considerations:
Team, traction, and market.
You need to tick 2/3 of these to fundraise.
Team
For team, to tick this box you need to have pedigree. Potential is not enough.
You need to have worked at a company like Meta, Google, OpenAI, etc, or graduated from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc, or be a repeat, somewhat-successful (raised money or generated >$100k revenue) founder.
You can also have very deep domain experience and something else that makes you special, ie. a big online following + building for creators, or an olympian building for athletes, you get the idea.
And that goes for all co-founders. If you’re solo, team is almost always a cross.
Traction